The third Gibraltar International Conference (GIC3), held at the University of Basel from 4 to 6 September 2025, brought together scholars, writers, performers and cultural advocates for a three-day programme examining Gibraltar’s multilingualism and literary production. 

The conference opened last Thursday morning with a keynote lecture by Professor Rico Valär of the University of Zurich, setting the tone for a day structured around the tripartite series “Llanito Meets Rumantsch.” The first session featured Gianna Olinda Cadonau and Gabriel Moreno in a poetic and cultural exchange that foregrounded the emotional textures of minority-language writing. The second brought together performer Flurina Badel and writer-translator Jonathan Teuma, whose staged and spoken contributions explored multilingual embodiment and creative practice. The third session paired editor Ruth Gantert with the poet Giordano Durante (via online link), who talked about his work and the setting up of the literary journal Patuka Press. 

A roundtable discussion followed, chaired by Professor Sandra Schlumpf-Thurnherr, with sociolinguistic inputs from David Levey, Elena Seoane and Marta Rodríguez García. The day concluded with a performance of Disgust by Flurina Badel.

Friday saw a number of academic and literary sessions that continued the conference’s focus on Gibraltar’s linguistic and cultural landscape. Abderrazak Salim (University of Cádiz) presented research on language variation and change within Gibraltar’s Moroccan speech community across three generations. Francisco Javier Fonseca (University of Cádiz) examined Gibraltar’s linguistic and semiotic landscape from a politico-linguistic and ethnographic perspective. Jan-André Diederich (TU Dortmund) proposed the use of inferential statistics in analysing linguistic signage in Gibraltar and La Línea de la Concepción.

The second panel, chaired by Ina Habermann, turned to literary analysis. Verónica Silva Folgar (University of Vigo) opened with a corpus-based study examining the use of grammatical markers in spoken Gibraltar English. Rafael Vélez Núñez (University of Cádiz) followed with a close reading of narrative restraint and omission in the short fiction of M.G. Sanchez. Habermann herself concluded the session with a paper exploring Llanito intertextualities in the poetry of Gabriel Moreno, looking at how Moreno’s poetry  is influenced by both Lorca and Leonard Cohen. 

The afternoon included an authors’ studio on writing and migration, followed by a public conversation chaired by Habermann with Jackie Anderson and Rebecca Calderon, joined remotely by Sophie Macdonald. Later sessions featured Josephine Cassaglia on publishing in Britain, and John Manuel Enriles and Dale Buttigieg outlining current challenges and plans for Gibraltarians for a Multilingual Society.

The Friday evening programme shifted the tone from analysis to performance, drawing together a range of Gibraltarian voices in poetry, theatre and music. Jackie Anderson opened with a reading that moved between personal reflection and social observation. Rebecca Calderon followed with a dramatic staging of Llévame Donde Nací, a piece that interrogates memory, displacement and the emotional residue of migration. Jonathan Teuma’s slam poetry introduced a sharper register before the evening closed with Gabriel Moreno in concert, his set weaving together lyrical fragments and musical motifs drawn from Gibraltar’s layered cultural inheritance.

Saturday’s closing session featured Isabel Alonso-Breto (University of Barcelona), who presented a paper tracing recurring themes in the work of Gibraltarian writers M.G. Sanchez and Humbert Hernandez and mapping out key ‘GibraLit Tropes.’ Before the event concluded, it was announced that GIC4—the fourth Gibraltar International Conference—will take place in Cádiz, Spain, in May 2026.

Travel and accommodation costs for the visiting writers were entirely funded by the University of Basel. 

Pics credit: Rebecca Calderon